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No Title Leaves Giambi’s Tenure Lacking

ANAHEIM, Calif. — It has been a wild ride for Jason Giambi, which is how it had to be for a player of such outsize tastes. For seven seasons, he has hit more Yankees homers than Roger Maris and sampled the nightlife with Ruthian gusto. He has been glorified and scorned like few before him.

As he comes to the end of his seven-year, $120 million contract with the Yankees, Giambi is hoping for more. He has not won the championship he was signed to deliver.

“I’d love to stay,” Giambi said. “Who wouldn’t want to play for the Yankees? We’ll see. It would be awesome.”

Giambi said he was not thinking much about next season, at least until the Yankees were eliminated from contention. But it is no secret they will reject his $22 million option for 2009. They will buy him out for $5 million and evaluate him as they would any other free agent.

In the weeks after the 2001 World Series, when they lost in the ninth inning of Game 7 at Arizona, the Yankees were convinced Giambi could help sustain their dynasty. Instead, they have reached just one World Series since.

To pin that drought on Giambi would be simplistic and probably unfair. In five of his seven seasons, including this one, he has been a top run producer. His prime seasons were in Oakland — when he was reported to have used steroids — but with 29 homers and 89 runs batted in at age 37, he is still a force in the Yankees’ lineup.

Looking back on the signing of Giambi, General Manager Brian Cashman acknowledged no regrets.

“Every time you get a piece in here, it’s about trying to help us win a championship,” Cashman said. “He tried to do everything he could to help us win. I’m very comfortable with his effort and everything he’s done. You see it in how he grinds out at-bats. He takes the game very seriously.”

Cashman continued: “I’m not in a position to tell you whether it was or wasn’t good. I know that I’m a big fan of Jason. He’s a great person. He’s made mistakes, he’s admitted them, he’s overcome them, and he’s played hard for this franchise.”

Giambi said that was how he would like to be remembered, as a player who always gave his all. He used a more colorful term than that, naturally, and that is vintage Giambi — reliably bawdy but committed to his work.

Photo

In his seven seasons, Jason Giambi has hit more home runs as a Yankee than Roger Maris did.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

It shows in Giambi’s patience at the plate, the trait that seemed to make him a perfect fit for the Yankees’ lineup when he replaced Tino Martinez. Fans have often called the loss of Martinez, Paul O’Neill and others the turning point in recent Yankees history, but the team won 305 games in Giambi’s first three seasons.

The Yankees won a pennant in 2003 and were poised for another in 2004 before Boston wrested away the American League Championship Series. Giambi took batting practice in the playoffs but was too weak to be a member of the active roster. He was recovering from a pituitary tumor, and his absence is the great unanswered question of his time in pinstripes.

“I know I would have made a difference in that series somewhere,” Giambi said. “We needed to win one more game, that’s it. I did everything I possibly could. That’s the one thing you can look in the mirror and say, ‘I couldn’t have done any more.’ I tried.”

He probably could have 100 R.B.I. if he had hit better with runners in scoring position. A career .303 hitter in those situations before this season, Giambi was at .220 this year, a failure he blames on the exaggerated infield shift.

“The shift has gotten me big time this year,” Giambi said. “Now that they play the shift so bad, it’s hard to drive in runs with two outs. If I hit it in the air, it’s not a sac fly, and when I hit it on the ground, it’s into the shift. I think that has played a big part in it.”

Even so, Giambi has been a steady presence in the lineup, surprising himself by the way his body has held up to the grind of playing in the field. Giambi emphasized running last winter, strengthening a repaired ligament in his foot, and Monday was his 99th game at first base, his highest total for the Yankees.

“That’s something I would not have expected,” Cashman said.

Yet because of Giambi’s age, and his history of breaking down, re-signing him would carry some risk. The Yankees have three other players who could take turns at first base next season — Jorge Posada, Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui — and they may be intrigued by the free agent Mark Teixeira.

In any case, Giambi will play somewhere. This is the lifestyle he loves, and with no injuries to nag him, there is no reason to get off the ride.

“I’d like to play two more years, for sure — I mean, that’s guaranteed — and we’ll see after that,” he said.

“I hate to put a number on it. I want to play as long as I feel good, and I feel great. I’ll play as long as I can.”